Market Landscape: Walking Between Financial Districts and the Planet

The financial district of Canary Wharf is central to London’s connection to the global economy. Many of the international financial firms headquartered there play a key part in funding industries responsible for climate change and environmental degradation — such as palm oil plantations, deep-sea drilling, and tar sands mining. In the public imaginary, these activities are often thought of as problems unfolding in far-flung landscapes, but we seek to highlight how they also take place at the centre of our cities, within a planetary-scale market landscape. In response to the rising public awareness around the dire circumstances our planet faces, we seek to revisit Canary Wharf’s architecture anew.

Through a walking tour of the district, we link the workplaces of financial firms to the effects their activities have on the world. We do so by showing how features encountered at street level — like place names, plant species, public artwork, and architectural designs — reveal the paradoxes and contradictions of corporate global actions. Walking tour participants will rediscover the landscape of an urban financial district in light of environmental emergency and gain a deeper understanding of the designer’s role in the making of our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene.

The walking tour is approximately 2.5 km long and will last two hours. The route is wheelchair accessible and includes stops to sit down and rest along the way. The event will be led by Sben Korsh and Maxime Decaudin as part of their 2018-2019 Emerging Curator project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

This event is free, but upon reservation only.
Please visit to RSVP : https://www.cca.qc.ca/marketlandscapelondon